Jerry Bonkowski: Jeff Burton still fighting’ despite setbacks

Wednesday

Oct 31, 2007 at 12:01 AMOct 31, 2007 at 4:36 AM

If someone finds a wayward license plate, please contact Jeff Burton – he's looking for one from the truck that hit him.

Jerry Bonkowski

If someone finds a wayward license plate, please contact Jeff Burton – he's looking for one from the truck that hit him.
How else can you explain the way Burton has struggled through the 10-race Chase for the Nextel Cup?
The South Boston, Va., native went through much of the first 26 races prior to the start of the Chase in the top five of the Cup standings.
And even though he started 11th of the 12 drivers who qualified for the Chase when the points were reset, Burton still figured to be a prominent player in NASCAR's 10-race championship playoffs.
Unfortunately, the reality became something entirely different.
And while he's finished in the top five in two of the past three races, with just three more races left in the season, it's a matter of too little, too late for Burton.
"We haven't run as well over the last three or four months as we'd like to run, for sure," Burton acknowledged. "So as the year winds down, the intensity of wanting to have some good runs and running in the front just continues to build."
Burton is ranked eighth in the standings heading into Sunday's Dickies 500 at Texas Motor Speedway – where he won at earlier this spring, making him the first Cup driver to ever win two races at the very fast 1.5-mile track since it opened 10 years ago.
But instead of coming back to Texas in the thick of the Chase battle as he would have hoped, Burton is simply playing out a string, hoping to maybe get back to fifth place in the standings by season's end.
"Obviously we're pretty much out of the championship hunt, but fifth is better than ninth, and 10th is better than 12," Burton said. "So we're going to go get all we can and try to get back on track."
Looking back on the first seven races of the Chase, three finishes stand out – and not in a good way.
He began the Chase at New Hampshire with a mediocre 18th-place finish. Two races later at Kansas, his No. 31 Chevrolet suffered a broken fuel pump, leading to a 36th-place finish and his championship hopes suddenly hanging by a thread.
That thread promptly snapped in the following race at Talladega, when his engine expired halfway through, resulting in a last-place finish among the 43 drivers in the event.
As a result, just four races into the Chase, and Burton's title hopes were over before they even had a chance to get going.
"We've had some things go for us and we've had some things go against us," Burton said. "At the end of the day, the thing we're not happy about is the way we've run."
About the only thing Burton has left to cheer about is teammate Clint Bowyer, who is ranked third and still has a mathematical chance of winning the championship – that is, if frontrunners Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson falter in the last three races.
"All we can do is try to be good teammates in every definition of a good teammate," Burton said. "We have to be sure that we are working together in an effort to give (Bowyer's team) every bit of support that we can give them.
"If (Gordon and Johnson) have any problems at all in the next three races we've got a whole ’nother ball game."
As for Burton, he may be out of the ball game, but he'll keep on swinging until the final out is recorded.
"We're still fighting, and we're going to go get all we can get."
Jerry Bonkowski is National NASCAR Columnist for Yahoo! Sports and a featured contributor for Gatehouse News Service. He can be reached at NASCARColumnist@Yahoo.com.

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